1. Field of the Invention
Aspects of the present invention relate to an apparatus and method to automatically configure an album and manage a cover image of the album, and more particularly, to an apparatus and method to automatically configure an album and manage a cover image of the album which easily and automatically configure a plurality of albums in response to a user command and conveniently manage a cover image of an album.
2. Description of the Related Art
With the development of mobile technologies, the number of people who use mobile devices, such as MP3 players, digital cameras, portable media players (PMPs), and mobile phones is sharply increasing. A user records multimedia content, (hereinafter, referred to as content), such as, for example, images, audio files, and video files, to the mobile device in various ways, such as by using a camera on a mobile phone or by downloading a song from the Internet. The user then manages the recorded content to perform various functions with the content, such as viewing an image taken with the camera or listening to the song downloaded from the Internet.
FIG. 1 is a flowchart showing a conventional method of managing content by creating an album which includes the content. First, at operation S11, a user inputs an “add album” command to a device, such as an MP3 player, which has the content recorded therein, in order to create an album to manage the content. At operation S21, the user inputs a name and a description of the album into the device.
Then, at operation S31, the user searches for images to be registered as a cover image of the album, and selects an image from the images found by the searching as a cover image. Also, if the user is creating a plurality of albums and there is an insufficient number of sample images to register as cover images of albums for each of the plurality of albums, the user may choose to omit the operation of creating albums with cover images, or may search for and register a predetermined image to be assigned to the extra albums which do not have corresponding sample images.
At operation S41, the user registers the selected image as a cover image of an album. Then, at operation S51, the user selects content (such as, for example, media files including music, video files, and photos) to include in the album, and registers the content to the album.
However, if a user uses the conventional method shown in FIG. 1 and described above, when a cover image of an album is not registered, the user may have difficulty efficiently managing a plurality of albums. Also, since a user has to perform each of the operations S11, S21, S31, S41, and S51 whenever a new album is created, it is inefficient for a user to create cover images for a plurality of albums.